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AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

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Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#211

Post by pizlonator »

lisbbb wrote: post #159
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the biggest unspoken story in tech. The era of American developer exceptionalism is over. Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor. You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts. It's not just React. Overse…

The ramifications of losing all or nearly all of the tech jobs in the US is that the last "good" place to find better paying work that had a fairly low barrier to entry is now gone. I think that has major consequences for the US economy. I'm 52 and I can't just go back to school and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now. I spent so many years becoming excellent and what I do, including higher degrees and certifi…

> and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now

It's worse than that. Who is going to pay the doctors and lawyers (and other folks providing services) if there are no more US jobs that product stuff for export.

And it's not even about services. Who is going to pay the home builders, electricians, plumbers, etc in a world where there is no money flowing into the US economy from the outside

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#212

Post by whoknowsidont »

cj wrote: post #201
whoknowsidont wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in other positions on earth. Which to be clear: is not happening. They're buying very low cost labor and are hoping to power through it for some sweet juicy numbers.

What makes someone in India (or the EU for that matter) an inherently worse developer than someone in the US? (Unless that’s not what you’re implying?)

Nothing. Don't think I said that, I certainly don't think it.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#213

Post by decimalenough »

moneywoes wrote: post #172
oxfordmale wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west. The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a semblance of competence. In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders online…

> Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west. In those locations? Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?

The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap teams.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#214

Post by torginus »

rcbdev wrote: post #200
torginus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions. All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'. Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind…

This markedly does not apply if the stack is esoteric enough and/or the code is bad enough.

I don't think aspiring to write awful backends in Elixir is the solution to this problem.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#215

Post by BobbyTables2 »

torginus wrote: post #190
Glyptodon wrote: post #20

As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in r…

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions. All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'. Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind…

You have an amazing amount of confidence that the new devs are going to fix subtle race conditions…

They’ll add a few sleep(5) calls to make them go away though..

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#216

Post by pessimizer »

random9749832 wrote: post #86
zbentley wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grandparent was referring to outsourcing, not H-1B hiring.

I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am responding that the bias in hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'. It is easy to make the 'cheap' argument when you talk about outsourcing but it no longer makes sense when you look at h1b numbers.

That's a commonly made argument, but it's innumerate. Low h1b salaries lower local salaries. The reason you hire h1b is because they're cheap, and then the only locals you hire are the ones that will work at the price of h1bs.

Local salaries might even be slightly lower, because you get to hold h1bs prisoner (an added benefit.)

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#217

Post by jdlshore »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #116
alecco wrote: post #29

This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o Not a single mention of jobs being moved to India including tens of billions of investments in new offices. Backing links from a quick search earlier this week when an obviously Indian HNer tried to deny this was really happening: Micros…

I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs. Not that I believe Trump actually cares about US jobs, let alone thinks strategically about the importance of a strong software sector, but you might expect him to at least do another mafia-style shakedown of the companies outsourcing jobs. Heck, you might think he'd even care about all the lost tax revenue, by having de…

Check out the HIRE Act.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#218

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #163
dehrmann wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol. Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit differences in vastly different standards of living between very very different economies. Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's and execs don't like. It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print. Workers need to…

As someone who over the past couple of years was responsible for some of these hiring decisions, it absolutely is a part of it ... lol.

I've worked with absolutely fantastic developers in Argentina, Poland, Romania and Ukraine. You're right, talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco. Teams are used to working entirely remotely now, videoconferencing software is great, and teams mostly align to US timezones (not entirely, but for example Eastern European workers shifted their day a few hours later so we get at least 4-5 hours overlap every day).

I think companies are a lot smarter about outsourcing now than they were 15-20 years ago and focus more on developer quality, but I've absolutely seen that a company will be much happier to hire 2 excellent senior devs from Poland for what you could get for 1 junior college hire in a high cost of living area in the US.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#219

Post by Tomcollins4 »

lanstin wrote: post #169
CivBase wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more inclined to work in the office if most of my coworkers weren't in India anyways. I can't exactly have water cooler talk with Manglesh while he's asleep on the opposite side of the planet. At least at home I don't have to spend 10 minutes of each meeting finding an empty conference room and getting the audio/video setup to barely function.

If you do work with folks in India a lot, it is a really good boost to your group productivity to go visit them in India, as an IC programmer. It is a safe place, people are very good at hospitality, and you can forge much stronger bonds of connection and of shared technical vision when people are people not just arbitrary strings in Slack (video conferencing can sustain connections but it is hard to make them over l…

this is the funniest comment I've read in a while

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#220

Post by torginus »

nine_k wrote: post #209
makingstuffs wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note on point 1: As someone who is Indian and frequently visits the sub continent (writing this from a suburb in Delhi) I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities (just left my family’s home city which falls into this bracket). I’m not sure if you’ve travelled much around the sub continent but I’d say you’re quite badly romanticising it. Yes we have our own cu…

While what you write is correct, the parent speaks about the most expensive tier of Indian cities, which are quite a bit nicer.

And are just as expensive as most nice places in the US
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